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Tips for effective sales management. Not particularly useful to me at the moment, since 90% of my work is long-term contracts, but good advice in general. "As my friend said, we are all selling at the end of the day. So, stop being afraid of the S-word. By finding a way to balance your creative role with giving sales the proper attention, you can improve the projects you’re working on and grow your business."

On the history of autism and the dramatic increase of diagnoses in Silicon Valley.

"What kind of noise are you feeling, and how far do you feel like sinking into it?"

"Have you ever started rapping along with some song on the radio and then realized that you don't know the lyrics? Now you don't have to worry about that embarrassing moment when it happens in front of your friends. OHHLA.com is your one stop shop for rap and hip-hop lyrics."

"It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don't worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul — remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days." I wonder if it takes just as long to break a habit?

What to stop buying and what to replace those things with. A nice list.

Basic setup instructions.

On the difficulty of preserving and reissuing classical hip-hop records. "The job that falls to those seeking to preserve hip-hop's past remains complex. Those doing the work need to know as much about copyright and contract law as they do about old Pete Rock B-sides, while a grounding in clinical psychology might help in dealing with the artists. It's a combination of specialisms few individuals possess, and it raises the question: just whose responsibility is it to curate the history of a culture?"

While the Roma of Europe struggle against incredible hardship, the immigrant Romany population of the US is doing quite well.

Noticing a theme here? I'm having serious productivity troubles right now, and I'm trying to trick myself out of them. "The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.' In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which."

"If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way."

A pair of commands for stripping whitespace from a document and saving it so as to avoid diff cruft.

"Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups."

I own a Seskimo Crabble (http://www.seskimo.com/crabble.php), but if I lose it, this homemade matte board cut-out stand will do nicely.

"He was condemned to death for telling the ancient Greeks things they didn't want to hear, but his views on consumerism and trial by media are just as relevant today."

"Commercial concerns are both implicit and invisible in the consumption of content."

"I’m afraid of what the systematic harnessing of communities will result in." Specifically, he's afraid that it will result in a) fans wasting their time and money and b) the artist being relegated to the sidelines while context and 'engagement' take over. Valid fears if you ask me, and exactly the sort of the thing that Matt LeMay outlines in the MBV post 'Living in the Age of Art vs Content' (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content/26911).

The Roma story.

"'I do not see any socially redeeming purpose being served by these beverages. At the end of the day, they’re aimed at a young, inexperienced market for the purpose of enabling them to become rapidly intoxicated.'"

"A day in the life of the President." "Durable achievement demands a long time horizon—something that the country as a whole seems to have lost. We can’t wait for the carrots to grow—we keep pulling them up to see how they’re doing. Thus, deeply complex problems, from illegal immigration to the BP oil spill—problems that by definition have no quick or easy solution, despite their obvious urgency—become easy emblems of presumptive failure, whatever the president may actually be doing to address them."

"People don't hate hipsters, and hipsters don't hate themselves. What people hate so much is the faux-hipsters: they hate poseurs. And because it's such an irritating thing to be having to tell the real from the fake (exactly as in the matter of overpriced European handbags), the easiest way out is simply to deny any involvement in the whole business. That is why nobody, not even someone who fervently embraces hipster culture, wants to call himself a hipster."

"'It sucks,' he says. 'It's no fault of any of the people in the industry, but music is not the main focus of my life. I never really planned on it being that way. When I meet people on the business end of this music-industry thing, they tend to really gross me out. I'm not trying to make money through this.'"

"'I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.' That's clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is... don't be like that man?" "Huh?" Violent J repeats, mystified.

Interesting interview. I would disagree, however, that the sequence is funny.

A followup to the article 'Do Fees Rationalize/Incentivize Communal-Culture Ecommerce?' checks in with actual musicians using the site, and finds that they're more or less unfazed by the change, and don't think it's evil by any means.

How native-language subtitled music videos dramatically increased literacy in rural India. And there's a local professor here promoting the same SLS ('Same-language Subtitles') idea. Would be nice to talk to him.

Nitsuh, reasonable as always, dissects the clash of rockists, 'true' fans, and people who write about topics outside their wheelhouse and why it bothers us.

"The Auerglass is a two person pump organ created by Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow (AKA the musician Glasser). The instrument cannot be played alone. Each player has a keyboard with alternating notes of a four octave scale. Each player must pump to supply the wind to the other player's notes."

Thoughts and collected quotations on Bandcamp's change of plans.

I asked a question and it got answered: "The rally, hopefully, will get a lot of people who have become frustrated with the political process engaged again. To the extent that it succeeds in that, I’m for it. If it does it while being entertaining, I’m doubly for it."